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Written in the form of a villanelle, "Mad Girl's Love Song" is a poem by American poet Sylvia Plath. She wrote the poem in 1953 when she was in her third year at college. The poem was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, where she completed...

The third and final canticle (set of cantos) in Dante’s “holy poem,” The Divine Comedy (in Italian, the Commedia), the Paradiso follows Dante and Beatrice as they ascend through heaven, meeting figures like Thomas Aquinas, Mary, and Adam. Like the...

Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion tells the frightening story of a deadly pandemic. It is an ensemble film that examines the disaster from multiple angles, as different characters grapple with the effects of the pandemic in their personal...

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is a surrealist novel about Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who leaves home to escape an Oedipal curse that predicts he will murder his father and have sex with his mother and sister.

Murakami alternates...

Kanthapura (1938) is Indian author Raja Rao’s most famous work, and especially notable for it being a debut novel written when Rao was only 21 years old. Rao sought to, Alpana Sharma Knippling writes, “experiment with the English language,...

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzergerald's greatest novel. It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility of the American dream. It focuses on a young man, Jay Gatsby, who, after falling in...

"This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" is a poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first composed in 1797, that describes the emotional and physical experience of a person left sitting in a bower while his friends hike through beautiful...

Walk Two Moons, published in 1994, was Sharon Creech's first novel to be published in the United States. The novel began, in the drafting stage, as a sequel to Creech's 1990 novel, Absolutely Normal Chaos, until, while writing, Creech came up with...

"Cozy Apologia" is a poem by American former US Poet laureate Rita Dove. It was first published in 2004 and is dedicated to her husband, Fred Viebhan.

Dove uses the poem to explore the world-building that happens hidden inside the mundanity of a...

“The Phoenix and the Turtle,” first published in 1601, is one of William Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poems. While Shakespeare is most famous for his plays and sonnets, he also wrote a number of shorter poems. Of these, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”...

"Prayer" is a sonnet written by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, exploring the intersection of religion and modernity. The poem was originally published in her collection Mean Time (1993), which won the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Whitbread...

“Fever 103” is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in the dark hours of the early morning on October 20, 1962, three months before her death. It was first published in the magazine Poetry in August 1963, and was among the poems Plath selected for...

Mumbo Jumbo is the third novel by Ishmael Reed, and many consider it to be his best. The complex plot and rich historical narrative portrayed full-bodied in Mumbo Jumbo grew out of just a minor digressive element of Reed’s previous novel, Yellow...

Normal People, the 2018 novel by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney, tells the story of a romance between two young people in contemporary Ireland. The novel was received extraordinarily well by both critics and readers, garnering Rooney an...

Sonnet 30, in which the speaker reflects wistfully on his own life but is comforted by the thought of his friend, was first published in Shakespeare’s 1609 Quarto. Like the other sonnets in the collection, Sonnet 30 is made up of 14 lines: three...

Published in 1928, Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is a personal essay that illustrates the author's experience of living as a Black woman. Through metaphors, controversial statements, and anecdotes, Hurston implies that she...

In the summer of 1937, Daphne Du Maurier’s husband was assigned as the commanding officer of the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards in Alexandria, Egypt. Du Maurier left her two daughters with their nanny in England and accompanied him to...

Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet whose work spanned more than half a century. Throughout his career, his poetry centered the beauty of the islands where he was born, and where he lived for much of his life. His work often considers themes of...

Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, which concerns a difficult relationship in which both the speaker and the lover lie to each other, was initially published in 1599 in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim. The book was attributed to William...

"The Hill We Climb" was first performed by Amanda Gorman on January 20, 2021, at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. As the youngest inaugural poet in history and the first National Youth Poet Laureate, Gorman's performance was an...

"Storm on the Island" is a poem by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, first published in his 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist. It has been interpreted as an allegory for political tensions in Northern Ireland, though it does not allude to these...

Published in 1942, Ismat Chughtai's Urdu short story "The Quilt" ("Lihaaf") is about a young girl who is molested by her mother's adopted sister, Begum Jaan. Narrated from the perspective of the unnamed young girl, the story first focuses on Begum...

"Refugee Blues," published in 1939 by the American-English writer W.H. Auden, is a blues poem describing the experiences and struggles of a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism. The poem was published on the eve of Britain's entry into World War II,...

“Facing It” is a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

Komunyakaa was deployed in Vietnam from 1969-1970 as a war correspondent for the military newspaper The Southern Cross, and witnessed the war’...